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ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 



Books by the 
AUTHOR OF "THE INNER SHRINE'J 

[BASIL KING] 

THE LIFTED VEIL. Blustrated. 

THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS. Illustrated. 

THE LETTER OF THE CONTRACT. Illustratad. 

THE WAY HOME. lUustrated. 

THE WILD OLIVE. Illustrated. 

THE INNER SHRINE. Illustrated. 

THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT. Illustrated. 

LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER. Post 8vo. 

IN THE GARDEN OF CHARITY. Post 8vo. 

THE STEPS OF HONOR. Post 8vo. 

THE GIANT'S STRENGTH. Post Svo. 



HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK 
Established 1817 



ABRAHAM'S 
BOSOM 



BY 

BASIL KING 

Author of "the high heart" 

"the inner 8HRINE" ETC. 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



-? 



JUN 



l9iH 



Abraham's Bosom 



Copyright, 191 8, by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published June, 1918 



©C!.A4^)9372 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 



Vdme ne pent se mouvoir, s^eveiller, ouvrir les yeux, 
sans sentir Dieu. On sent Dieu avec Vdme comme on sent 
Vair avec le corps. 

Oserai-je le dire? On connait Dieu fadlement pourvu 
qu'on ne se contraigne pas a le definir. 

The soul cannot move, awake or open the eyes with- 
out perceiving God. We perceive God by the soul 
as we feel air by the body. 

Shall I dare to say it? We know God easily so long 
as we do not force ourselves to define him. 

— ^Joseph Joubert, 1754-1824. 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 



CHAPTER I 

BECAUSE he was unaccustomed to doc- 
tors, and thought it the right thing to 
say, he asked the physician to name his 
malady frankly. 

''I wish you'd tell me. I can stand it, you 
know." 

In the bottom of his heart he was sure 
there was nothing to be afraid of. He was 
only sixty, which in the twentieth century is 
young, and as hale as he had been at thirty. 
This weakness, this sudden pain, this sense of 
suffocation, from which he had been suffering 
for the past few months, might be the begin- 
ning of a new phase in his Ufe, the period 
commonly known as that of breaking up; 
but even so, he had good years still before 
him. 

He could wait for the doctor's answer, then, 
without undue anxiety, turning toward him 
3 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

an ascetic, clean-cut profile stamped with a 
lifetime of high, kind, scholarly medita- 
tions. 

The doctor tilted slightly backward in his 
chair, fitting his finger tips together, before 
he spoke. Any telltale expression there 
might have been in his face was concealed 
by a scraggy beard and mustache that grew 
right up to the edges of a lipless mouth. 

*^It's what is called Hutchinson's disease," 
he said at last. '^I've known a few cases of 
it; but it's rather rare" — he added, as if re- 
luctantly — ^^and obscure." 

'^But IVe heard of it. Wasn't it," the 
patient continued, after a second's thinking, 
^'the trouble with poor Ned Angel?" 

'^You mean the organist chap at Saint 
Thomas's — the near-sighted fellow with a 
limp — the one you had to get rid of?" 

A sharp hectic spot like a splash of red 
paint came out in each of the clergyman's 
wax-like cheeks. 

*^ That's the man. It — it carried him off 
in less than two months." 

The doctor was used to embarrassing 
situations. 

'^I believe it did," he responded in a tone 
that seemed to make the fact of slight im- 
portance. ^'I remember hearing that he put 
4 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

up no fight; that he didn't want to live. 
You knew him better than I did — *' 

''I knew him very well indeed; and a 
sweeter soul never breathed.'' There seemed 
to be something that the rector of St.Thomas's 
was anxious to explain. '^He'd played our 
organ and trained our choir for forty years — 
ever since the church was a little mission 
chapel, none too sure of its future. He was 
a chemist by profession, you may remember, 
and he'd done our work entirely without sal- 
ary. But you know what American churches 
are. Once we'd become big and wealthy 
we had to have the best music money could 
provide; and so poor Angel had to go." 

'^And it killed him." 

''No; I don't think so. People say it did; 

but I don't agree with them. It nearly 

killed me when I had to tell him — the parish 

put it up to me; but as for him he simply 

seemed to feel that his life on earth was over. 

He had fought his good fight and finished his 

course. That was the impression he made on 

me. He wasn't like a man who has been 

killed; he was rather like one who has been 

translated. He just — was not. All the same 

it's been a good deal on my mind; on my 

conscience, I might say — " 

But the doctor had other patients in the 
5 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

waiting-room and was obliged to think of 
them. 

''Quite so; and, therefore, you see that in 
his case there were contributing causes; 
whereas in yours — " 

It was the patient's turn to interrupt: 

''And for this Hutchinson's disease, is 
there any cure?'' 

In spite of his efforts to seem casual the 
doctor's voice fell. 

''None that science knows of — as yet. 
But able men have taken it up as a spe- 
cialty — " 

*' And its progress is generally rapid, isn't it?" 

''Since you ask the question, I can only 
say, yes — generally. That doesn't mean, 
however, that in the case of a man of tem- 
perate life, like you — " 

But Berkeley Noone had heard enough. 
He listened to what the doctor had to say in 
the way of advice; he promised to carry out 
all orders; but he was sure his death sentence 
had been pronounced. He took it as most men 
take death sentences — calmly as far as the 
eye could see, but with an inner sense of being 
stunned. Getting himself out of the office 
without betraying the fact that he knew he 
had heard his doom he roamed the city 
aimlessly. 

6 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

By degrees he was able to think, though 
thinking led no farther than to the over- 
whelming knowledge that he was to be cut 
off. Cut off in his prime were the words he 
used. He had never been more vigorous 
than in the past few years — except for those 
occasional spasms that latterly had come and 
gone, and left him troubled and wondering. 
They had not, however, interfered with his 
work, seeing that he had preached and lect- 
ured and visited his parishioners and written 
books as usual. Moreover, he had fulfilled 
his duties with a power and an authority for 
which no younger man would have had the 
experience. For another ten years, he had 
been reckoning, he could go on at the same 
pace; and now the ten years were not coming! 



CHAPTER II 

NEVERTHELESS, when, a few weeks 
later, he was confined to bed he began 
to see that his situation was not without ad- 
vantages of which he had taken no note at 
first. For one thing, he was tired. He had 
not recognized the fact till he had kept his 
room a week. A day having come when he 
was slightly better, it was suggested that he 
might get up and go out. But he didn't want 
to. He preferred to stay where he was. His 
lack of zest surprised him. It surprised him 
still more when he crept back into bed, with 
the conviction that it was the spot he liked 
best of all. Bed by day had always fired him 
with impatience. Now it seemed to him a 
haven, delicious and remote. The world 
might wag in the distance, but the wagging 
had nothing to do with him. 

Nothing to do with him when all his work- 
ing life had been spent at the heart of its 
energies! He had wrought and fought, and 
struggled and suffered, and lost and won. 

He had been maligned and abused and mis- 
8 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

understood, and had found enemies where he 
might have looked for friends; and yet he 
had never been more himself than when in 
the excitement of battle. It was the less 
credible then that the world should have no 
interest for him any more, and that he should 
find it a relief to get away from it. 

And he should get away from St. Thomases. 
Six months ago he would have been angry 
with the manjiwho had suggested that as a 
possible form of solace; and yet the fact was 
there. The parish had been his life. He had 
come to it as its first rector; his preaching 
had built it up. He had hardly ever taken 
a holiday without regulating beforehand 
every service and meeting that would take 
place in his absence. He had hardly ever 
come back without the sense of being just 
where he belonged. And now he should never 
again go into the pulpit and instruct other 
men as to what they ought to do! Never 
again should he make his round of calls on 
kindly, carping parishioners ! He should not 
have to take the respectful admonitions of his 
vestry any more, or try to appease its mem- 
bers, or defend himself for writing books. 
All that was over. He sank back among his 
pillows, with a sigh of comfort. He should 

get away from it. 

9 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

Later he made a discovery that astonished 
him and gave him pain. He should get away 
from his wife. 

A Httle thing revealed this, too, as an es- 
cape. Emily had bustled into his bedroom 
with a cup of broth. She liked plenty of salt 
in her broth, and he very little; but it was 
one of those small differences of taste to which 
she had never become reconciled. It fretted 
her that he shouldn't know when things were 
as they ought to be; and, not to fret her, he 
had during two-and-thirty years submitted 
to her wishes docilely. But to-day he felt 
privileged to put up a mild protest. 

'^ Isn't there too much salt in this broth, 
dear?" 

Standing by his bedside, she took the cup 
and tasted it. 

^^No, darling. It's very good indeed. I 
seasoned it myself. It's exactly right." 

*^ Thanks, dearest." As broth exactly right, 
he forced himself to swallow it. 

Having relieved him of the cup she went on 
to make him comfortable. He had been 
comfortable as it was, but she didn't believe 
it. She had always declared that if he would 
only rest as she did he would get more repose. 
She proceeded, therefore, to show him how, 
as she had shown him how perhaps a million 

10 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

times in the course of their life together. 
Patiently he allowed himself to be pulled and 
shunted while the sheets were straightened 
and the pillows smoothed, and he composed 
his figure to the lines that suited hers. 
Patiently, too, he pretended to be more at 
ease than he had been before, though he was 
saying to himself, with some eagerness, that 
death would take him away from this worry- 
ing wifely affection which never let him 
alone. 

The anticipation gave him pangs of con- 
science, since they had lived together with 
quite the average degree of happiness, and 
he loved her with a deep and quiet love. 
Moreover, in spite of her double chin and 
her increase in waist-line, he had never 
ceased to see in her the timid, wild-eyed 
nymph of a thing who had incarnated for 
him all that was poetry in the year when he 
was twenty-eight. Not till after their first 
child was born had her bird-like shyness 
yielded by degrees to an assumption of 
authority, which in the end became a sort 
of lordship over him. By the time they had 
had three children she had formed the habit 
of correcting the thousand and one small 
faults into which he fell without knowing it. 

The way he ate; the way he sat at table; the 
11 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

way he held a book; the way he coughed; the 
way he yawned; the way he shook hands; 
the way he pronounced certain of his words; 
the way he gave out his notices in church; 
the way he allowed other men to walk over 
him — these, with a hundred similar details, 
had become the sphere of her loving, con- 
jugal discipline. 

For more than twenty of their thirty-two 
years of married life her comments on his 
oddities had trickled on like a stream that 
flows and stops, and stops and flows, and 
never dries up entirely. He had borne it all 
because she could at any time, even now, 
throw him that look of the startled dryad 
which touched some hidden spring in him; 
but the moment had arrived when he couldn't 
help saying that he would be glad to get 
away from it. 

And then, as his children roamed back 
one by one to see him die, it came to him that 
he should be glad to get away from them. 
That was a discovery which shocked him to 
the core. His children had been part of him- 
self. They had been good children, too — on 
the whole. There were five of them, and 
their ages ran from thirty-one to twenty- two. 
From a worldly point of view they were all 
doing reasonably well — and yet they were 

12 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

doing reasonably well in ways that never 
turned to him for sympathy. 

Berkeley, Junior, was a broker in New 
York, and lived on Staten Island with a wife 
and a baby son. He seldom came home now, 
except for a wedding or a funeral. The 
father had had hopes for something more 
brilliant for the lad in the year when he was 
born; hopes that had grown with the boy's 
growth and followed him to school and 
college, only to fade when the young man 
struck out for himself. 

Then there was Constantia, who had been 
such a wonderful little girl. Beauty and 
cleverness had been her portion, with a 
command of the piano that had promised 
the career of a Carreno. But she had married 
an agnostic professor in a Western state 
university, where, owing to the necessity of 
doing her own housework, she had given up 
her music, while in submission to her hus- 
band's teaching she refused to let her children 
be baptized. 

The twins, Herbert and Philip, were in 

modern phases of business, the one selling 

agricultural implements in Texas, the other 

automobiles in Detroit. There was nothing 

a father could complain of in this. Berkeley 

Noone would not have so much as sighed if it 
13 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

hadn^t been for his hopes. They had been 
such angeHc Uttle boys, and so quick at 
everything! He had placed them in the 
ideal walks of hfe; one perhaps as a his- 
torian or philosopher, and one — one at least 
— as a clergyman. But they had preferred 
the great career of making money, and, like 
their elder brother, rarely came home now- 
adays. 

Beatrice was the enigmatic one. Though 
but twenty-two, she was restless and eager, 
and sometimes unhappy in ways as to which 
she never gave her mother or himself her 
confidence. Nominally living at home, she 
was oftener than not away on the pretext of 
studying art. All he knew of her with cer- 
tainty was that she moved in the advanced 
brigade of the woman's agitation, that she 
had extraordinary friendships with young 
men, and that she smoked a great many 
cigarettes. Affectionate enough, but wilful 
and mysterious, it pleased her to keep her 
parents in ignorance as to her doings, once 
she had closed their door behind her. 

If his offspring had disappointed him it 
was not precisely disappointment that had 
worn him out; it was a sense of the futility 
of bringing children into the world at all. 
He had put his strength into theirs and they 

14 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

hadn't needed it. So long as they had let 

him, he had lived their lives with them, and 

shared their struggles, and suffered their 

pains; he had yearned and longed and looked 

forward for them more than they had ever 

yearned and longed and looked forward for 

themselves. He had seen them all as children 

of destiny! Whatever they might become, 

they could never be commonplace! Even 

when they had crosses to carry and cares to 

endure, their places in life could never be 

anything but high ones! And now — now 

they were all there, each absorbed in what 

seemed to him a merely starveling way of 

life, waiting for him to die in order that they 

might return to it as quickly as steam and 

electricity could carry them. Vitally and 

essentially he was no more to them than the 

parent bird to the robin that has mated and 

made its nest in another tree. 

So he gave up his yearnings over them. 

As they came and went in his room he 

watched them with the same detachment they 

betrayed toward him. He would have said 

he had outlived them had he ventured to 

use a word in which life was a compound. 

Certainly there was a sense in which he had 

outgrown them. He had left them behind in 

some race that had more than death for its 
15 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

goal. The effort to keep going back to them, 
going back and puUing them along, was too 
wearisome to keep up. 

In the place for which he was bound he 
would get rest from the cravings on their 
behalf that had haunted him ever since the 
minute when he knew the first of them was to 
be born. 



CHAPTER III 

AND yet his thoughts were not all of rest. 
-^^ Far from it! He was of Puritan stock 
and traditions. Though in later life he had 
abandoned that belief in an angry God in 
which his childhood had been nursed, some- 
thing of the early teaching clung to him. 
Won as he had been by the modern doctrine 
of eternal hope, he still lapsed into moments 
when death became to him, in biblical phrase, 
"a certain fearful looking for of judgment.'' 
He had been a great sinner. Though no 
one knew it but himself, a great sinner he 
had been. He had preached to others, and 
warned them, and consoled them, and pre- 
pared them for death, and had passed as a 
man of God; and no one suspected the depths 
of evil that lay beneath the dignified surface 
of his life. There had been wicked thoughts, 
hasty words, carnal desires, envies, antip- 
athies, doubtings, angers, rashnesses, and 
everything else that makes a man's inner life 
something which he hides from others, and 
that often appals himself. 

17 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

This was true even of his later Hfe. And 
when he went back to his earlier manhood, 
to his youth, to his boyhood, to his child- 
hood- 
There were nights when the cold sweat 
broke out all over him as he thought of these 
things. In a few days now — in a fortnight 
or three weeks at furthest— he would have 
to give an account of all that was recorded 
against him. When the Throne was set and 
the Books were opened he might be blasted 
forever under the Judge's keen, all-seeing 
glance. That glance itself would be the 
worm that dieth not and the fire that never 
should be quenched. 

But he had other moments of exalted and 
somewhat desperate trust in a redeeming love 
that had paid the penalty for these offenses 
and won their forgiveness. He was not very 
clear as to how this vicarious atonement 
could ever have been made; but since the 
thought of it was all there was to cling to he 
did his best to cling to it. He repeated 
hynms and prayers and passages of Scripture 
as he had repeated them at the bedsides of 
men and women who had been facing the 
crisis he was facing in his turn. He told him- 
self he was comforted; he almost persuaded 

himself that he was; and yet at the back of 
18 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

his mind there lay the suspicion of a mere 
self-administered spiritual drug. 

So day by day he receded from the world, 
from his work, from his wife from his family 
and from all that had formed his interests, 
seemingly making that peaceful end for which 
those who cared for him watched and prayed. 
But inwardly he was like a man sweating 
blood. Death was abhorrent to him. There 
were minutes when he could have doubted 
the goodness of a God who had foreordained 
it. What was the good of birth and effort and 
love if they could only end in this? There was 
the great question with which he wrestled as 
he had never wrestled with anything before. 

He reminded himself of One who said, 
'^If a man keep my saying, he shall never 
taste of death." But for sinners like himself 
there was nothing in the promise, or in any 
promise similar; and there never had been. 
He should have to taste of death. He should 
have to eat its last morsel and drink its last 
dregs. Hutchinson's disease had got him by 
as many tentacles as the octopus gets its 
victim. It was swathing him round, and 
dragging him down, and darkening his in- 
telligence. He was going the way of all flesh. 
His wife would come after him, and their 
children after them, and their children after 

19 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

them; and so on till the globe collapsed. 
What was the good of it? What was the good 
of it? Why could not the All-intelligent, if 
there was such a Being, have given man a life 
that wouldn't have to come to this miserable 
wreckage? 

<rhese were his thoughts as he waited for 
his last agony. That it was expected soon he 
judged by the way in which the doctor shook 
his head, and his wife relaxed her bustling to 
watch him with tearful eyes. Two or three 
times a day the boys tiptoed into the room, 
gazed at him with solemn, sympathetic faces, 
and tiptoed out again. Beatrice cried in 
corners, and Constantia helped the nurse 
when her mother was obliged to rest. 

Practically they had taken their farewell 
of him; but there came a day when they did 
it in actual fact. It was a bright summer 
afternoon, with the sunshine streaming in at 
all the windows. The nurse had given the 
sign by summoning Emily; Emily had called 
Constantia; and Constantia, Beatrice and 
the boys. They all kissed him, and stood or 
sat about the bed, his wife holding one hand 
and Phil the other. He hardly knew by what 
signs they judged, since he felt but little 
weaker than on other days and not much 
more pain. They seemed to know, however, 

20 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

that the time had come, and to treat him a 
little like the jailers and sheriffs who notify 
the condemned that the supreme minute is 
approaching. 

He could only let them do as they thought 
right, fixing his eyes somewhat vacantly on a 
picture which had long hung at the foot of 
his bed, and which was a favorite. It was a 
steel engraving of Holman Hunt^s ^' Light 
of the World," purchased on his honeymoon, 
after Emily and he had seen the original at 
Oxford. Neither of them had been expert 
critics of painting, but they had stood to- 
gether and spoken of the light thrown out 
by the lantern in the Saviour's hand as one 
of the most beautiful things they knew. For 
the figure and face they had not cared. They 
had cared for nothing but that light. For 
him, if not for her, it had remained a lasting 
memory. He had been able to see it in the 
steel engraving's black-and-white splotch 
during all the intervening years, and to 
identify its glow with England and Oxford, 
and young love and his soul's striving. 

And he saw it now. It was odd — but he 
did. It positively burned in the lantern. He 
was glad of the illusion, because it helped 
him, he thought, to get nearer the last minute 
without knowing it. It would come, of 

21 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

course — that last minute. There would be 
an instant, perhaps in half an hour, when his 
soul would tear its way out of his body and 
he should be thrust, a naked, quivering bundle 
of spiritual nerves, before angels and arch- 
angels and principalities and powers, and a 
God whose first question would be that 
which was put to Cain: ^'What hast thou 
done?'' If, then, he was not to hear the 
sentence, ^^ Depart from me, ye cursed, into 
everlasting fire," it would only be because 
there had been a cross on Calvary. Mentally 
he clung to that cross as he watched the light 
grow brighter and brighter in the lantern in 
the print. 

He was dimly conscious of a man he knew, 
a brother clergyman who had administered 
the last sacrament to him on the previous 
day, coming into the room and kneeling at 
his bedside. Dimly he was conscious that the 
family knelt down and that there were 
prayers. They were prayers that came to 
him as if from such a long way off as hardly 
to reach his ear. When the murmur of ''Our 
Father'' traveled up it was like a rumble 
from a world below him. He tried to join in it ; 
but he couldn't keep his mind on the phrases. 
He couldn't keep his mind on the phrases 
because of the shining of the light. It was 

22 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

becoming an amazing light, bursting the 
limits of the lantern, making glory of the 
figure, making beauty of the face, turning 
the crown of thorns into jewels, and throwing 
a sunshine brighter than the sunshine on the 
wall. 

It was a pleasant illusion, he told himself — 
the action of the self-administered spiritual 
drug he distrusted and yet relied on. At any 
rate, it made things easier. It gave him a 
sense of relief that might even be called 
physical. He noticed, all at once, that his 
pain was gone. That, of course, was illusion, 
too — probably no more than the end of his 
power to feel; but the iron claws that Hutch- 
inson's disease had dug into his flesh had 
loosened their grip. He was breathing easily 
for the first time in months. Had he not 
known that he couldn't really be 'letter, he 
would have been tempted to say he was well. 
He would have been able to get up; only that 
it was so delicious to lie there seemingly free — 
he reminded himself that it could be no more 
than seemingly free — from torture, and with 
his mental burdens gone. What had dis- 
pelled them he didn't know; but it was a fact 
that they had rolled away. 



CHAPTER IV 

*'rpHIS is rest!'' he murmured to himself. 

-l A voice answered him promptly : 

'^Yes; it's rest, because you're now be- 
ginning to realize as a fact what you've 
always taken as no more than a lovely 
spiritual image — that underneath are the 
everlasting arms." 

He was not surprised at the voice. Familiar 
with the fancies of the dying, he knew to 
what to ascribe it. He reminded himself 
that he must hold on to his senses till he was 
deprived of them, and so made no effort to 
reply. 

Instead, he watched the spreading of the 
light that flooded the room and glorified its 
occupants. Wife and son and daughter were 
all beside him; but in that light they were 
different. They were also doing things he 
didn't clearly understand. All he knew was 
that he felt toward them an extraordinary 
tenderness, and that something similar came 
from them to him. 

'^I suppose this must be dying," he said to 

24 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

himself, as he noticed that the new day had 
blotted out the sunlight. 

*'No/^ came the voice again; '^ because 
there's no such thing as death.'' 

To Berkeley Noone, this was the real 
point at issue. It was worth taking up, even 
if only in delirium. 

*^0f course there's no such thing as death 
from the spiritual point of view — " 

*^And there is no other." 

'^I know there'll be no other in the next 
life;W— " 

''But there's no next Hfe. There's only 
one life." 

''In a sense — yes," he admitted, not with- 
out a shadow of impatience. "And yet I'm — 
I'm dying." 

"No; you're only waking — waking from 
the deep sleep that fell on Adam and on all 
Adam's so-called children." 

He fixed his attention on but one of these 
points : 

"Why do you say so-called?" 

"Because they're only the offspring of a 
dream." 

"I don't see how they can be the offspring 
of a dream when a dream is nothing — " 

"Pardon me; a dream is something — 
while it lasts. It's only seen to be nothing 

25 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

when we wake and know it for what it 
was.'' 

^^And do you mean to tell me that all my 
past life has had no reality?'' 

*'Not all your past life; only whatever in it 
may have been evil, mortal, or unhappy. 
Once we've thrown off that, we come to our 
genuine birthright. You're probably able 
to prove it by some heightening of your 
faculties already." 

^^Do you mean the light I see from the 
picture at the foot of my bed?" 

There was genuine curiosity in the tone: 

''Won't you tell me what it's like?" 

He complied with this request. The voice 
continued : 

''That's very like my own experience — 
only that in my case the increase of percep- 
tion was in the way off what our mortal 
senses call sound. You were with me at the 
time, and may remember." 

"I?" 

"According to the reckoning of time it was 
in June over a year ago. The day was close 
and the windows were open. The noises of 
the street came up to my room rather dis- 
tressingly. I tried not to listen to them or be 
annoyed by them; but it v/as beyond me. 
Then by degrees all such noises merged into 

26 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

something else — into music — into floods of 
music — into floods on floods of music; and I 
was made to understand that in the Reahty 
there is no such thing as ugly sound; that it's 
only the senses of the Man of Dust that de- 
grade to harshness and discord that which in 
itself is harmonious and lovely." 

With some surprise Berkeley Noone be- 
came aware that behind the voice there was a 
personaHty. Timidly he asked the question: 

'^Aren't you Angel?'' 

The answer came with what he would 
hitherto have called a smile. It struck him 
now as an effulgence : 

*'The name will do for the present. You 
and I are still within the sphere of mortal 
thought — you, of course, more than I; but 
we shall work away from it." 

Among the questions Berkeley Noone was 
eager to ask, one presented itself as most 
pressing to his curiosity. It stood for years of 
speculation, wonder, and hope. 

"Then," he began, still timidly, "you're 
really able to come back and be with us — 
here in my room?" 

There was a repetition of what seemed to 
him an effulgence. 

"You must remember that what you call 
your room is only a phase of mortal con- 

27 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

sciousness. It's one of the expedients by 
which the Man of Dust makes use of his 
limitations. Being finite himself he can think 
only in terms of spaces and walls and tables 
and chairs, which he sees to stand for other 
ideas as soon as hel)egins to see at all. What 
you've said of the new light makes a very 
good illustration." 

'^But that's only the illusion of a dying 
man." 

''It's more than that. It's the point by 
which your waking thought catches on to 
actuality. What you've seen in your picture 
hitherto has not been what was there; it was 
what the Man of Dust put there as the best 
he could do. It's been a sheet of white paper 
with some printing in black; but it was as 
much as the eye of Dust could see. Your 
mind, on the other hand, got hold of the 
immortal conception when your mortal vision 
was blind to it." 

*'And by the immortal conception you 
mean — " 

''We'll see that if we go back to your 
picture. Jesus spoke of Himself as the Light 
of the World; but He never meant that He 
was such a light as mortal discovery draws 
from electricity. He was a light in con- 
sciousness. As a light in consciousness He 

28 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

has appeared to every generation since He 
uttered the words. As a hght in consciousness 
the artist saw Him, even though he himself 
couldn't get beyond canvas and paint. But 
it was the light in consciousness that appealed 
to the engraver who copied the work, and 
through him to you. The engraver was trying 
to give you some of that light, and some of it 
you got. Now you're getting more of it. 
You haven't it all, by any means; but you 
can see for yourself that you've made a 
long step forward from paper and ink. 
You'll find that ever to be making new and 
beautiful discoveries, and yet never to ex- 
haust them, is one of the joys of the new 
condition.'^ 

Berkeley Noone returned to the point he 
had raised before. 

^'What interests me most is that the de- 
parted can really come back — '' 

A ripple in the effulgence might have 
corresponded to laughter. 

"But there are no departed. Absence and 

presence are states of consciousness. When 

you've learned more of infinity you'll see 

that it's so. I've been with you /ever since 

what you called my death, and you've been 

with me.'' 

There was here new matter for surprise. 
29 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

"IVe been with you? I confess I don't 
understand — " 

*^ You've been with me in the sense in 
which a sleeping man is with the waking one 
who sits beside him and watches. You've 
been dreaming of me — " 

*^I've been thinking of you — a good deal — 
if that's what you mean." 

"The expression will pass. And, as weVe 
been so much in each other's thoughts, I 
happen to be the one with whom you can 
most easily come into touch, now that — " 

"But I don't see you." 

"You don't see me partly because, if I may 
go on using mortal terms, you've never seen 
anything in your life." Before a protest could 
be expressed, the voice continued: "Though 
the Man of Dust knows he never sees any- 
thing farther off than a reflection on the 
retina of the eye of Dust — a reflection turned 
upside down, and which he has always to be 
correcting mentally — he rarely stops to 
consider that. He talks of seeing; he 
persuades himself that he sees. Knowing 
that, strictly speaking, you were blind, you, 
nevertheless, taught yourself to think 
that a mere reflection was Edward Angel, 
when, as a matter of fact, I was something 

else." 

30 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

"If you were something else — what were 
you?^' 

"You'll know that as you go on. At 
present let me say that I was not the short- 
sighted fellow, with a limp, who played the 
organ at Saint Thomas's. He was the 
illusion of the Man of Dust. He saw me, he 
made me see myself, with infirmities that 
never existed, except in the mind of Dust." 

"But even the mind of Dust, as you call 
it, can take cognizance of — '' 
/"It can take cognizance of nothing but in 
corrupting facts and disfiguring them. The 
Man of Dust has no faculty for under- 
standing things as they are, otherwise than 
remotely.'' 

It suited Berkeley Noone to argue, since 
the process dulled his anticipation of the last 
event. It annoyed him somewhat that the 
bases of existence, as he had always con- 
ceived of it, should be so radically called into 
question. He seized, therefore, on what 
seemed to him an admission. 

"But remotely, your Man of Dust can 
understand?" 

"Doesn't your present experience answer 
that? You have seen the ^ Light of the 
World' as clearly as it could be transmitted 
to you through canvas and paint or through 

31 



ABRAHAM^S BOSOM 

paper and ink. Now you're looking at it more 
nearly as it is.'' 

^^But you allow that I've seen it already 
to some degree?" 

^^If you hadn't seen it already to some 
degree you wouldn't be getting this fuller 
conception of it now. Light is one of the 
most radiant symbols we have for God; and 
all through the ages of time men have loved 
darkness. Those who love darkness must go 
on in darkness till they win out to a glimmer 
of perception. Those who love Light inherit 
it. There are no leaps and bounds in life. 
What mortals call death takes them where it 
finds them — as every day and hour does the 
same. If through the mortal years you 
hadn't been working away from mortahty — " 

^'I should still be seeing in the * Light of 
the World ' no more than the engraver could 
show me. I shouldn't have reached what you 
call the immortal conception. I think I 
follow you." He harked back to the con- 
sideration he thought not to have been fully 
met. '^And yet I don't understand why, if 
I can see the ^ Light of the World/ I can't, 
for example, see you." 

'^Aren't you still keeping too close to 

Dust conceptions? Aren't you forgetting 

that in the Dust condition you were blind? 
32 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

You never got beyond your own eyeball. 
You never really saw a person or an object 
of any kind. Before you could think so, 
you had to learn a whole series of Dust con- 
ventions. You had to be taught shapes and 
colors and distances and comparative sizes, 
and come to an agreement with other Men 
of Dust that a bed was a bed and a chair 
was a chair, when in reality you didn't know 
what they were.'' 

^'I knew a chair was a chair by sitting in 
it, and that a bed was a bed by lying down." 

^^Did you? What are you lying in now?" 

'^Am I not lying in my — " 

But the sentence died on his lips. When 
he sought for his bed, with its pillows and 
its sheets, he found something else. 

^'Well?" 

The word was accompanied by a renewal 
of the quiver of amusement in the radiance. 

Berkeley Noone answered very slowly: 

"My bed — seems to be — a wonderful — 
comforting — sustaining — knowledge that — 
that I am — supported." 

*'And isn't that what I told you at first — 

that it's positively a fact that underneath 

are the everlasting arms? The Man of 

Dust takes these eternal truths and makes 

them temporary, material, destructible. For 
33 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

inexhaustible sustenance, protection, and sup- 
ply he uses as his symbols trivial things, like 
tables and beds and walls and floors, and food 
to eat and money to spend. In the very act 
of yearning for the actual he contents him- 
self with a falsification, just as a child who 
grasps at the moon can be satisfied with a 
tinseled toy. Sight, which is an attribute 
of Infinite Intelligence, he locates in a blind 
material physique; and, even while ad- 
mitting his mistake, he goes on making it.'' 

Berkeley Noone endeavored to show the 
mortal impulse as less culpable than it was 
represented. 

^^And yet we Men of Dust, as you call 
us, admit that we see^with the intelUgence. 
We don't merely speak of seeing with the 
eye. One of our commonest expressions is, 
I see! — as applied to comprehension." 

^^ Which goes to prove what I've been 
teUing you. The Man of Dust is rarely 
without some gleam of true understanding. 
It has to be remembered that the mist 
which, as mortals saw for themselves in 
the book of Genesis, went up from the 
earth is less dense in some places than it 
is in others; that the deep sleep which fell 
on Adam is a restless sleep. At times the 
Man of Dust is haunted by nightmare; 

34 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

he exists in a delirium of terror and pain. 
At times he is so nearly awake as to catch 
a glimpse of the blissful and peaceful reaUty. 
In his music, for instance, and all his arts; 
in goodness and all high thoughts; in love 
and compassion, and learning and knowledge, 
and every honest pursuit, he sees some ray 
of that reahty which you're beginning to 
perceive as you never did before; and he 
strains toward it." 

^'So that when a man says I see! — in the 
sense that he understands — he puts himself 
on a higher plane than when he merely tells 
himseh he sees with the physical senses." 

^^You must be getting that conviction for 
yourself. It must be growing plainer to you 
that mortal intelligence is less deceptive than 
the mortal senses. The mortal eye, like 
everything else that is made of Dust, is poorly 
adapted to its purposes. Assuming that it 
ever sees more than an inverted reflection, 
its range is still limited; and within that 
range it is subject to a thousand errors and 
infirmities. The mortal intelHgence, being 
nearer akin to actual Intelligence, is less 
liable to error, even though it errs. Man 
only sees when he sees altogether through the 
mind; and it is in mind only that I shall see 
you and you will see me." 

35 



CHAPTER V 

BERKELEY NOONE withdrew from com- 
munication with his invisible companion 
in order to assimilate some of these ideas. 
In his effort to cling to his faculties, as he 
called it, he put it plainly to himself that he 
was in a state betwixt reality and dream- 
land. The very clarity of his mind was like 
that produced by some mighty stimulant. It 
was one of the phases of dying he had heard 
about; but it was at least a pleasant phase, 
putting the evil moment a little further off. 
Meantime he watched his wife and children 
with renewed perplexity. 

It puzzled him that, while he was lying 
at the very point of death, they should 
apparently be going and coming on errands 
not directly connected with himself. 

A few minutes ago his wife was holding 
his right hand and Phil his left. 

Each of the others was watching him, 
as he was watching them, with eyes of 
piteous farewell. He might have supposed 
that, for the rest of the time he stayed 

36 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

with them, they would have no other pre- 
occupation. 

But now they seemed bent on obeying 
some lord who was not death. Moreover, 
in the '^ Light of the World," they continued 
to undergo a transfiguration he could neither 
describe nor define. They were themselves 
but themselves glorified. Emily was again 
the dryad of their youthful days; but a 
dryad with ways of light and tenderness he 
had never known her to possess. Each of the 
children was bathed in the same beautifying 
radiance. He knew them — and yet he didn't 
knowthem. All hecould affirm of them exactly 
was that his doubts and worryings and dis- 
appointments on account of them were past. 
He felt what Angel had just been telling 
him, that he was waking from some troubled 
dream on their behalf. The boys were not 
sordid; Beatrice was not wilful; Constantia 
was not a renegade to her God. That he 
should ever have thought so began to seem 
to him incomprehensible. 

Angel spoke, as if there had been no 
interruption : 

''It's because mortals never see each other, 

except as wearing grotesque masks, behind 

which the true and normal features are 

hidden. The Dream Man may catch the 
37 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

shadow of God's Man; but he never beholds 
him as he is. He invents another Dream 
Man. The Dream Man is to God's Man no 
more than the reflection in the hollow of a 
silver spoon to the face it is supposed to 
give back.'' 

Once more Berkeley Noone was quick to 
seize a point that made for mortal reality: 

'^But there is a face there." 

**0h, yes; there is a face there. The Man 
of Dust never creates anything. He only 
takes what God has created and distorts it. 
His senses have about the same degree of 
accuracy as wind-swept water, which shows 
the objects standing above it not only upside 
down but quivering, broken — a succession of 
shadows that appear and disappear and re- 
appear, and have no stability." 

"But your Man of Dust has intelligence; 
he has power. Look at his development 
through the ages; look at his discoveries, 
his inventions, his mastery of the elements." 

"You mean that he has his approaches to 
actuality. True! There are spots where he 
so penetrates the mist that it grows very 
thin. His great advances are in the direction 
of truth. ^ His use of steam, of electricity, 
of the Hertzian waves, brings him nearer to 
things as they are; and so nearer to God. 

38 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

It's one of his limitations that he can only 
think of coming nearer to God ethically. 
He sees God in His relation to moral right 
and wrong, and he hardly ever sees Him in 
any other way. He practically never takes 
the telephone, for instance, or the motor-car, 
as his demonstration of God's power. He 
looks upon them as his own discoveries or 
inventions, having nothing to do with God; 
and so directs his advantages not to good 
ends but to evil.'' 

While Berkeley Noone was considering a 
response to this, Angel's voice, after a brief 
pause, went on : 

^'How are the Children of Dust making 
use of the knowledge they've gained during 
the last fifty years of their counting? Is it 
to help one another? Is it to benefit them- 
selves? Is it to make the world happier, or 
more peaceful, or more prosperous? Haven't 
they taken all their new resources, all their 
increased facilities, all their approximations 
to Truth, all their approaches to God — the 
things which belonged to their peace, as 
Jesus of Nazareth called them — and made 
them instruments of mutual destruction? 
Aren't they straining their ingenuity to 
devise undreamed-of methods for doing one 
another harm? 

39 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

''You think me harsh toward them; but 
can you consider for a moment their colossal 
stupidity and not be harsh? Isn't it fair to 
say of the carnal mind that its promptest 
use of a blessing is to turn it into a curse? Is 
there any good thing that it has not, at one 
time or another, so perverted that it becomes 
difficult to see what useful end it was meant 
to serve? Isn't it a fact that the most 
beautiful things in mortal existence — the love 
of husband and wife, for instance, or the 
affection of parent and child — are so wrested 
by the carnal mind from the purposes for 
which they were ordained that they become 
the causes of misery?" 

Berkeley Noone having reluctantly ad- 
mitted this, the quiet voice pursued its line 
of reasoning: 

*'The best that can be said of the carnal 
point of view is that it doesn't last. The Man 
of Dust is fully aware that he has only a brief 
day. From the beginning he foresees his 
end. Dust he is, and to Dust he must return. 
He can pervert the facts for no more than 
threescore years and ten, or fourscore years 
— or a hundred years at most. Knowing 
that, he keeps his worst error in reserve." 

"And his worst error is — " 

''The invention of death." 

40 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

''Ah, but is death an invention? Isn't it 
the most real of all realities? Here am I, a 
dying man — '' 

^'Everything is real to which we lend 
reality. It has just the reality we lend to it. 
The Man of Dust persuades himself that 
his return to his natural nothingness is the 
most fearful form of destruction. He fright- 
ens his children into the belief that, with the 
passing of delusion, something vital in them 
ends. He calls into existence a hundred 
bogies — a future life, another world, a hades, 
a purgatory, a hell. Even of a heaven he 
turns the lofty spiritual imagery of John, in 
the Revelation, into a tedious, useless mate- 
riahty. He stops at nothing that will add 
terror to man's blessed waking from his 
night of phantasms. You yourself were 
probably not free from some alarms, any 
more than I." 

The thought that had been forming in 
Berkeley Noone's mind now burst from him 
with extreme intensity of awe : 

''But am I— am I— dead?'' 

Again there was that dancing of the 
radiance which might have represented 
laughter. 

"How can you be dead when there is no 
death? Do you think yourself dead?" 

41 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

He sought another way of putting it: 

'^Then — then — has the great change taken 
place?'' 

'^There's been no great change to take 
place — for you. All your life you've been 
doing your best to throw off mortality; and 
now you're succeeding. That's all! As for 
a great change — well, that's for those who 
still remain in the mortal state. They are 
saying you're dead; but you best know 
whether you are or not." 

In the enlarged consciousness, amaze- 
ment struggled with relief. It was the latter 
that triumphed as he asked, incredulously: 

''But is it— is it— over?" 

''Haven't you been looking for a shock, 
when life, as we know it, has nothing but 
sweet and gentle transitions?" 

Berkeley Noone was still unable to con- 
vince himself. 

"But how can I be" — unable to find any 
other, he used the word again — "how can I 
be dead when I'm still in my room, with my 
family?" 

"You mean that you haven't fully aban- 
doned your mortal point of view. That will 
come by degrees. Even as it is, you see 
some things differently, don't you?" 

This could not be denied. As Berkeley 

42 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

Noone looked about him — if looking was 
the word — he began to note a transmutation 
of all the things with which he had been 
familiar. It was true of them, as of the 
members of his family, that they were the 
same, yet not the same. If he could have 
found words to describe his new perceptions 
he would have said that he was getting to 
the inner essence of objects of which he had 
hitherto known but the surfaces. Mortal 
symbols had, on the whole, been well enough, 
so far as they went; they had only been 
inadequate. They had been inadequate and, 
as he found himself able to observe, un- 
satisfying. They had been unsatisfying be- 
cause they brought tremendous truths down 
to the temporary or the trivial. 

He found himself moving about the well- 
known chamber. Everything was around 
him that he had known of old; objects he 
had once possessed but had lost or other- 
wise parted with seemed also to be his again; 
and yet each thing was there with a sig- 
nificance he had never supposed to be in- 
herent in workaday bits of furniture. He 
had already seen his bed melt into a knowl- 
edge of support; his arm-chair was now an 
assurance of rest, with its complement of 

strength. 

43 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

Where there had been his bedroom desk, 
with papers and pens, and the paraphernaha 
of a busy hfe, there was the promise of 
activity. The floor became a sense of the 
sohdity of his new condition; and the wall 
a guaranty of privacy, of independence, of 
a place for him as an individual in an infinite 
world of work. 

Whatever had been matter he saw as 
thought; but thought which, nevertheless, 
projected a new type of objectivity. The 
rugs were thoughts; the pictures were 
thoughts; each tiny trifle, useful or useless, 
as the case might be, represented some 
eternal, indestructible idea. A few rows of 
books, some of which he had not taken from 
their shelves for years, were a thronging 
variety of thoughts, glowing, glorious, crowd- 
ing one another, and yet making room for 
one another, like jewels in a treasury or 
flowers in a field. 

It was his bedroom. He had no doubt of 
that. It was the intimate environment his 
needs and tastes had created, and which 
expressed him. But it was to be his forever. 
It was not a spot he had been allowed to 
love and permitted to rest in, and from 
which he was to be torn away. There had 
been no such futility to life; no such lack of 

44 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

purpose in its development. What he had 
gathered he was to keep; what he had cared 
for he was to continue to enjoy. The dear 
famihar things that the Man of Dust had 
told him could be his but for a little while 
were to abide with him — not only as the 
medium through which his spirit had worked 
outward, but as an earnest of security. 

He could hardly tell by what means he 
apprehended this, or whether the physical 
senses were still at his command or not. He 
could not have said whether sight and hear- 
ing had become amplified, or whether they 
had yielded to some higher method of per- 
ception. He was like a new-born child, so 
abundantly endowed with gifts that as yet 
he is incapable of appraising any one of them. 
He could only perceive — and enjoy. He could 
only enjoy — and delight in the knowledge 
that he was beyond the range of vicissitude. 

Love and its blessings were not to be 
snatched away from him. The past, with 
its ties and its kindly, simple associations, 
had not been lived through in vain. He 
was not to be wrenched from them abruptly, 
or sent to strange spiritual countries, where 
even the highest pleasures would be alien. 
He was merely living on; living on with 
heightened powers, doubtless, and with a 

45 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

more exact valuation of men and things — 
but living on. 

It ceased to be a question in his mind as 
to whether he was still within his room or 
not, because space, as he had known it, no 
longer had significance. Words like ^ ' where " 
and "when'' began to give up their meaning. 
That which was vital to the past being his 
forever, conditions of time and place did 
not arise. All the taxed and tired recesses 
of his being, so worn with the struggle 
against chance and change and mortal fear, 
could rest. 

"After all/' Angel answered to these re- 
flections, "rest is humanity's primary crav- 
ing. It asserts itself above all demands for 
joy or power. Just as the infant's capacity 
for sleep is beyond any other of its functions, 
so to those emerging from mortality the 
mere knowledge of safety is a reason for 
taking that perfect, delicious repose which 
the Man of Dust never permits to himself 
or to his children. It isn't sleep, for the 
reason that the true mind never has to 
relax. But not to have to be afraid any 
more! . . . Never again to have to worry 
or be anxious, or to fret oneself! . . . He 
who comes where at last he sees this finds 
nothing so bhssful as just to rest and rejoice." 

46 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

So Berkeley Noone rejoiced and rested. 
It was occupation enough, it was happiness 
enough, to be getting the true meaning of 
his past. The knowledge that life was not 
the fleeting thing it had always been de- 
scribed to him, that it had everlasting val- 
ues, was in itself a satisfaction of which his 
spirit took long draughts. All that was good 
and useful and honest and well-intentioned 
remained as a perpetual inheritance. He 
returned to the fact again and again. There 
was only one life, as Angel had told him; 
there was only one world. No sudden 
transplanting made a shadow of the one, 
and no violent breaking-off a monstrosity 
of the other. He lived and saw; he lived 
and knew; he saw and knew and lived. He 
lived with: the old things he had always 
lived with, discovering only their full uses; 
he lived with the old ties, learning only 
their stability and permanence; he lived 
with the old duties, perceiving only that 
as he would fulfil them thenceforth in 
higher ways they would lead to higher 
issues. 

And as he thought of higher issues an- 
other question arose in his mind. It was a 
startling question : 

^^If I'm dead, why don't I— see God?'' 

47 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

AngePs voice replied, as though the words 
had been actually spoken: 

^^ Aren't you seeing Him?'* 

*^Why, no!" 

"Why not? What did you expect to 
see?'' 

Before this simple inquiry Berkeley Noone 
was dumb. When he tried to formulate his 
hope it was brokenly. 

^^IVe always understood that — that I 
should be taken before the Great White 
Throne; and that, high and lifted up — " 

"You'd see a supernal Man, or three su- 
pernal Men, taking great delight in an ador- 
ing chorus from a white-robed throng?" 
A pause preceded the next words, like a 
pause of reflection. "'The letter killeth, 
but the spirit giveth life,'" the unseen com- 
panion quoted. "There have been few for 
whom John didn't write the book of his 
Revelation quite in vain. It has been the 
conviction of the Man of Dust that if he 
didn't see a reflection turned upside down 
on the retina of Dust he didn't see at all. He 
has persuaded himself that he lives in a 
world where God is invisible, when, as a 
matter of fact, even he, with his Dust limi- 
tations, is always seeing Him." 

"Oh, but I haven't been always seeing 

48 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

Him/' Berkeley Noone began to plead. '^If 
I had—'' 

'^ You've been seeing Him and you didn't 
know it. Go back to what we said as to 
sight being not the action of a temporary 
optic nerve, but essentially the power to 
understand. We see God by what we un- 
derstand of Him; we understand Him by 
His attributes; and we measure His attri- 
butes by their beauty and goodness and 
practicality. Wherever there has been a 
blessing for you to enjoy, you've seen God. 
Whenever love has cheered you or kind- 
ness helped you, you've seen God. In sun- 
rise and sunset and moonlight and starlight, 
and trees and fields and harvest and flowers 
and ice and snow and air, and health and 
beauty, and generosity and friendship, and 
all that gives pleasure to existence, you've 
seen God. He hasn't been invisible. There 
is not one world in which God is seen and an- 
other world in which He is not. There is not 
a fife with God and another life away from 
Him. There is only one world, and God 
fills it; there is only one life, to which God 
is All-in-All." 

"And yet we speak of the Unseen — " 
"The Man of Dust speaks of it; and, to 
make him understand, it may sometimes be 

49 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

necessary to employ his terms. He has 
other such expressions, too, in his vocabu- 
lary. He has a beyond the veil, and a 
beyond the clouds, and a beyond the tomb, 
and a dozen other misleading tokens. But 
there is no Beyond. There is only a universal 
Here! There is only an ever-present Now! 
'No man hath ascended up to heaven,' " 
Angel quoted again, ^^'but He that came 
down from heaven, even the Son of man 
which is in heaven.' To the true Son of 
man, who is also the true Son of God, heaven 
is not another world or an afterworld; it's 
the only world. It's a state of consciousness 
He never leaves and of which He never loses 
the assurances. He has the highest authority 
for knowing that in it His angels do always 
behold the face of His Father.' " 

"His angels — yes; but that doesn't neces- 
sarily mean Himself." 

"Doesn't it? What are angels? Aren't 
they messengers? Aren't they messages? 
And haven't you always been sending your 
messages and messengers straight to Him? 
In yearnings and prayers and aspirations 
and hopes, and a thousand other impulses 
of your being, what have you been doing 
but sending troops of your angels to see His 
face? Abandon the inverted reflection on 

50 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

the mortal retina as a necessity for sight — 
and you see Him at once.'' 

^^So you would say that in my present 
more accurate knowledge of things as they 
are—" 

^^You are seeing God as youVe always 
seen Him, even though not so radiantly as 
now. What more remains is not for me to 
say, since I am doing only that much my- 
self. All I can affirm is what Jesus of Naz- 
areth affirmed, that to know God is eternal 
life, and that they who possess even the 
rudiments of that knowledge shall never 
and can never die. What the end of that 
knowledge shall be surpasses our capacity 
to guess at, as God Himself surpasses it. 
For the present we are the inheritors of love, 
joy, and peace; and in proportion as we 
have them — whatever the stage of our prog- 
ress out of material beliefs — we see at least 
the fringe of the robe of Him whose qualities 
they are." 

Thus, to Berkeley Noone the Vision of God 
began to unfold itself. He was seeing where 
he had supposed himself blind; he was 
bhnd in ways in which he thought he had 
seen. Hymns of praise broke from him 
spontaneously — not in set phrases, nor with 
what he had hitherto called melody, nor 

51 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

with singing of the voice; but in an irre- 
pressible gratitude. That nothing of the 
past was wasted was the theme of his ever- 
recurring song. To see evil pass into noth- 
ingness in the degree to which Dust theories 
were shaken off was like emerging into sunlit 
air after existence underground. Once he 
beheld the unity of life, the unity of purpose, 
the unity of good, his being became incense, 
viol, and harp, and he was ready to cast his 
crown before the Throne, saying: 

'^ ^Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive 
glory and honor and power: for Thou hast 
created all things, and for Thy pleasure they 
are and were created.' '' 

And within the vision of God he saw his 
wife and children — always busied in ways 
he didn't understand; always occupied on 
errands that had nothing to do with him. 
It was not continuously that he saw them, 
and it was not near, and it was not all to- 
gether. They came to him singly, or in 
groups, or in glimpses. Such communica- 
tion as he could hold with them was 
chiefly in a sense of well-being and of mutual 
love. 

'^You'll come closer to them by degrees,'^ 
he was informed by his guide. ^'It's a mat- 
ter of perception. All things will be possible 

52 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

in the measure in which you free yourself 
from mortal restrictions/^ 

''But what are they doing? ^' 

''They're about their Father^s business, 
as you and I are." 

The answer both rejoiced and troubled 
him. 

"I'm afraid they were not — or they 
weren't wholly — " 

"When you as a Dream Man saw them 
as other Dream Men? No ! But the Dream 
Man always misinterprets. The Children 
of Dust see each other as lying and cheating 
and hating and killing, and given over to 
every kind of wickedness and frightfulness. 
That is the inversion of what they are 
actually doing as the Children of Light. 
What puzzles you is that, in throwing off 
the dream, you are seeing those who are 
dear to you not as you supposed them to be, 
but as they are. Each one of them is doing 
his Father's business, positively and always, 
no matter what grotesque or hideous per- 
version the dream consciousness may try to 
fix in him. In the Reality there is no thwart- 
ing of the Almighty, even though raortals 
pride themselves on being able to do it." 
He added, gently and yet joyously, "Great 
is the mystery of being!" 

53 



ABRAHAM'S BOSOM 

" ^ And great is the mystery of godliness/ " 
the other quoted, in his turn. 

''And wonderful is it to emerge from 
darkness and half lights into the dayhght 
of the Sun of Righteousness/' 

''But blessed/' Berkeley Noone went on, 
fervently, "are they who, in half lights and 
darkness, are able to see that they shall 
emerge quietly, simply, naturally — and not 
be violently thrust into glories or terrors 
they cannot understand. 

"More blessed are they who learn to live 
in God as in the One Vast Certainty — 
which created every one, and supplies every 
one, and upholds every one, and defends 
every one, and loves every one; and does it 
all with unlimited intelligence and might — 
'to whom be glory and dominion for ever 
and ever.' " 

"Amen! and Amen!" 



THE END 



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